RUNS IN THE FAMILY

Big questions and stunning answers transcend the playing field.

McCullough, an accomplished coach with college and pro football experience, and Spain, a diligent ESPN reporter, recount the former’s life story in poignant detail, building to a remarkable closing-act development. McCullough, who grew up in battered, postindustrial Youngstown, Ohio, was 7 when his mother, Adelle, told him he had been adopted. The matter went largely undiscussed in the following 30 years, during which he became a star running back at Miami University in Ohio, played professionally, and embarked on a coaching career with the Kansas City Chiefs and Notre Dame, among others. His success, the product of an “unparalleled work ethic” and his patience with young players, followed a tumultuous youth. The men in Adelle’s life were foul tempered and disinterested in parenting McCullough, compounding the “feeling of loss and rejection” stirred by “his birth parents abandoning him” and his first real girlfriend’s barbed comments about his adoption. Carrying “pent-up anger” and “deep-seated issues with trust and worthiness,” an adult McCullough sometimes got so irate “that he’d almost black out,” fueling heated confrontations. He did “the work over the years to know how to downregulate his emotions,” but the authors are vague about what that work entailed. McCullough and Spain hint at the big reveal in their prologue, but it is nonetheless powerful when it arrives. He was in his late 30s when an important conversation with Adelle inspired McCullough to obtain his birth records, triggering a series of events felt in households in multiple states. This is a sensitive, observant reflection on trauma’s long tail and a veritable how-to on responding to unforeseeable events with exemplary grace.

A moving account of a gridiron pro’s extraordinary search for his biological parents.